Global PC market shrank 11 percent in second quarter

A man pushes a trolley full of Dell computers through a company factory in India in this 2011 photograph.

SAN FRANCISCO — Global shipments of personal computers slumped 10.9 percent in the second quarter, the fifth straight quarterly decline in a market that has been devastated by the popularity of tablets, research firm Gartner said on Wednesday.

Marking the longest decline in the PC industry's history, Hewlett-Packard in the June quarter lost ground to Lenovo, now the world's leading personal computer maker with a market share of 16.7 percent.

"We are seeing the PC market reduction directly tied to the shrinking installed base of PCs, as inexpensive tablets displace the low-end machines used primarily for consumption in mature and developed markets," Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said in a news release.

Also on Wednesday, research firm IDC said PC shipments dropped 11.4 percent in the second quarter, a bit better than expected.

"With second-quarter growth so close to forecast, we are still looking for some improvement in growth during the second half of the year," analyst Jay Chou said in IDC's report.

PC makers shipped 76 million computers in the June quarter, compared with 85.3 million in the same quarter last year, Gartner said.